Everything is connected

Halfway through this novel, with three murders on his mind and the stench of an 1868 St Petersburg summer ripe in his nostrils, investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich has a revelation: everything is connected. There is a link between Dr Martin Meyer, whose wife and son have been poisoned by the chocolates he bought them, and Ruslan Vladimirovich Vakhramev, found standing, gun in hand, over the corpse of his daughter's lover. A secret shared in a brothel and revealed in notes sent to each man will entwine their fates with those of a phony priest, a clerk, a factory worker and a number of Petrovich's own colleagues. Petrovich journeys from the dachas of bloated counts into cholera-ridden slums, connecting prostitutes, bureaucrats and aristocrats to find the centre of this web. As fans of Morris's previous A Gentle Axe will know, this author not only has the nerve to lift his lead character from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment but also the skill to bring that distant Russia and its inhabitants to life, while drawing parallels with our own world.